Rising floodwaters stopped them cold. Fonseca engaged the emergency brake, but water was still shifting the car. They started to get out.

“When I opened my door, and the water came up, I said, ‘This is real serious now,’” Fonseca remembers. “I said, ‘Oh, Lord, we’re going to die!’”

‘We’d better go get them’

Fortunately, Tri-County’s operations manager, Rickey Hanes, and maintenance man, Dave Paulling, came along. They’d been out since midnight, relieving linemen who had restored power for more than a day.

At first, the men thought the sedan was unoccupied. Hanes soon realized otherwise: “I said, ‘Dave, somebody’s in the car. They’re hitting their brake lights. We’d better go get them.’”

Paulling suggested, “Pull up beside them. You’ll block that water.”

Hanes eased the one-and-a-half-ton co-op truck forward. “Dave got out and stood between the truck and their car,” Hanes says. “He held onto his door and opened their door. We had just enough room for them to get out.”

Fonseca and Paulling laugh as they recall her first words to him. “She asked if we had a chain to tow them with,” Paulling says. “I told her, ‘We don’t have time for no chain! Get in the … truck!”

“He was very clear about that!” Fonseca says.

She and Moseley climbed into the truck’s back seat—and not a moment too soon. Hanes says, “I started backing up. I could feel my truck starting to shake and slide a little bit. We eased on out of there.”

Moments later, floodwaters took the Plymouth, Hanes says. “I said, ‘There she goes!’ Down the creek it went.”